Nope. It’s a purely mechanical mechanism. It isn’t an electronic button you press. It’s a giant yellow button that’s really hard to press (disengage the brake) and then pops back out quite aggressively when you pull on it (to engage the brake.)

You’ve lost me.

Transit buses do too. It’s a second knob right next to the parking brake knob that allows you to use a reserve air supply to temporarily disengage the parking brake in order to move the vehicle :)

Correct. Again, though, this incident was due to a loss of electrical power, not air pressure.

We aren’t talking about a loss of air pressure. We are talking about a loss of power (electricity) as in what occurred in this case.

To answer your initial question, though, since I never really got around to it, air brake equipped buses are fail-safe in the same way as trains. They use air pressure to RELEASE the parking brake shoes, so a loss of air pressure from a severed line, or a failed tank or valve or pump or whatnot, will cause the brakes…

No, actually. What if the power cuts out while the bus is moving? Do you want the brakes to suddenly slam on at full force, throwing all the passengers out of their seats, and causing an accident behind you?

Not every single scenario is deserving of this kind of a fail-safe mechanism. If a vehicle loses electrical…

They ARE fail-safe. They aren’t dumb safe. This guy left the seat without engaging the brake. The only failure was on the part of the bus operator. If you are driving your car, and the electrical system cuts out, would you want the brakes to slam on? Nope! Nothing “failed” here. The operator was asked to “power cycle”…

Yeah, the interlock system is basically to prevent the bus from rolling forward as passengers are boarding/alighting if your foot slips off of the brake. It isn’t really an “emergency stop the bus from moving if all hell breaks loose” system. It has a very specific purpose only, which is to prevent you from pissing…

Some transit agencies have the driver’s area separated, but the door wouldn’t have been locked since the operator was outside of the vehicle. Yes, it is a bright yellow button, but on these buses it is sometimes located on the left side of the driver’s area, down beside the seat... so you can’t necessarily even see it…

Would you want your car to slam on the brakes if it lost power? The power loss isn’t the problem. The fact that the driver left the seat without engaging the parking brake is the problem.

Yes, it would have worked. It is indeed pneumatic.
Source: I used to drive these things.

Yeah, this looked to me like just a compilation of clips meant to represent “war stuff.” Not like a specific clip meant to represent an actual, specific event. This is much ado about nothing.

I took my BRZ on ice a few weeks ago! So much fun!

Can someone clarify one thing that wasn’t fully explained in the description quoted in the post? Does this flow contain water? I had kind of assumed it was just “rock infused” water. Is this 100% just dry rocks doing this? Because that’s nuts. They do look dry...

They put a lot of work into this, and it looks cool as hell, just like most Rube Goldberg machines...

...but the way the video was edited completely ruined the effect. It needs to be one continuous shot. I know that might not be the easiest thing to do, but people who take this much time to work on something like this…

Your nuclear deterrent analogy fails miserably. That would be akin to giving every country in the world nuclear weapons. There are only a handful of countries in the world who have nuclear weapons... and most countries are okay with that. Want to guess why?

Because most of them realize that if we started handing out…

This seems like a great “zombie apocalypse” boat.

I have literally three (four) wheeled a large paratransit van. Nobody had ever seen anyone do it before (it was at our agency’s yearly “bus roadeo”) and apparently it was simultaneously amazing, and terrifying, to watch.

Haha, I may or may not have done the same, albeit with a newer bus. We also might or might not have routinely drifted one or two turns that for some reasons the plows never cleared very well. Passengers don’t like when their bus is drifting across three lanes of traffic :P

My only experience driving a fishbowl, was…